Sunday, 11 May 2008

MEANWHILE TERENCE VISITS TEOTIHUACAN AND CELEBRATES WITH AN EXHIBITION IN LA 5 YEARS OF LOVE STORY WITH JAVIER

Vanesa Fernandez, editor of Celeste Magazine, being photographed while photographing Terence Koh as captain ahab a golden buddhist in the pyramids of Teotihuacan.

hello deer

this is terence koh

my first show was with this gallery almost 5 years ago WOW

may 10, 2008 that's gonna bee five years of love between javier peres and me

i remember coming to chung king road for the first time and seeing the little street with red lanterns

i remember falling in love with the street immediately

i remember walking into the gallery and thinking it was perfect and magical

i remember sleeping on the couch of the gallery on the second floor while installing because javier couldn't really afford to pay for my motel (yep motel, not hotel)

i remember eating the mostest yummy steamed shrimp with my boyfriend garrick and javier at the restaurant across the street

i remember driving with javier for the first time in his huge silver jeep on the highways of la way pass midnight at about 180 miles per hour and he was swigging whiskey from a silver flask and i was screaming at him that we were both completely going to die that night

i remember walking around with javier in the seedy pet district of downtown los angeles trying to find two perfect white budgeries for my show and finding them and then going to eat vietnamese desserts right after to congratulate ourselves

i rememeber realizing after spending 8 days in la that waking up every day felt like the most strange deja vu because it was always sunny every day every day

i remember javier contacting me via email for the first time saying immediately he wanted to do a show with me in his new gallery in la and i was very confused because i didn't have a single clue what being an artist was

i remember my first studio visit with javier in my tiny tiny apartment in chinatown in new york and it was night and we sat on my big white table which took up the whole room and i showed him a little white jewerly case with a gold capital M letter stuck on the top and when you opened it there was the thinnest sliver of glass (the kind you use for looking at specimens under microscopes) and it had a gold capital E stuck on it, my ME box and javier said he would buy it for 20 buck and that was the first thing he bought from me

i remember the very first time i met javier was in new york where he standing next to a bed in this little tiny hotel room for the scope art fair and i was there with garrick and i immediately thought javier was someone i could trust and love forever and was going to be a friend for life, and i never felt that way before

i remember every single shopping trip i made with javier buying clothes together, one of our many naughty vices

i remember waiting for javier in the prada shop in london for more than an hour after the store was closed and the whole staff waiting around in the store and looking at me and i was feeling terribly uncomfortable and hating javier every single second because i was waiting for javier to come use his credit card to buy me a mink jacket cause my credit card could not take the 13,500 pounds the jacket cost and then forgiving him afterwards cause it was the most expensive thing i bought to date and it felt great wearing it even though i am vegetarian for ethical reasons

i remember every single morning with javier as the sun came up because we were up all night and hating the sunlight and wished i had sunglasses and borrowing his sunglasses twice

i remember in mykonos, greece baptising javier for his birthday in the dark night of the greek sea, while i was wearing a custom coat made out of about 200 chinese hairs and he was completely naked and i thought that he was my baby son

i remember the absolutely terrifying sound of of 21 shots from a gun that javier fired in the basement space of his gallery for the main piece of our first show, which was 21 identical prints of a lovely young boy on purple paper

i remember very well cycling on my bike round and round at the same spot for about an hour under the yellow glow of street lights near my apartment on henry street and talking to javier on my cell phone when we found out i was in the whitney biennial 3 months after my first show with him

i remember too the 3 months after the opening of our first show when we only sold 2 sculptures and javier and i felt completely miserable cause we thought we would strike it big with money

i rememeber telling javier he was crazy when he said that my sculptures for the whole family show should sell at 1000 dollars a piece and i told him to get a grip and that he should really sell them for 300 dollars or something like that

i remember how excited we were when phil and shelley aarons (they are forever my other daddy and mommy) bought the first thing from the show, which was the owl shelf with the big fake diamonds for eyes

i remember being cramped in many many many small bathrooms with javier all around the world and especially the time javier, dash and me made out at passerby in the bathroom the night of my whitney biennial

i remember a few times when i was drunk horny and high and i wanted javier to fuck me doggy style even though we have never had sex but we like to say we doo

i remember or know that javier has always had a crush on my boyfriend

i remember that javier had a good sense of style when i first met him with his cheap t-shirts and american apparel jeans but that after 5 years of shopping with him i have given him an acquired taste for the very best and now his sense of style is absolutely low key while being strikingly fabulous

i remember driving in a cab in london with javier my DADDY (one of my nicknames for him) a few years ago when we were doing the frieze art fair and telling him that we would know we would have made it when we finally could afford to stay at claridges and now that is our favorite hotel in the world

i remember the time when i caught chicken pox for the first time at the age of 27! and i was crushing in his la apartment and he brought me honey to make a drawing cause i was going mental being stuck in his apartment 24/7

i remember the time when javier stole a blond haired boy from me at around 8am in the morning when i was totally crazy for him and they both secretly went off to have sex with each other instead and i don't think i will ever forgive him for that

i remember javier helping me to glue and paint the sculptures for our first show together in the basement of the gallery at night every night till opening night

i remember 5 years ago when garrick and i were so broke that a good day for us was when we could afford to buy an egg to eat with our pack of 50cent rice which was flavored with free soy sauce packets

i remember that night when javier was having sex with a fucking hot stud in the basement of the la gallery and i came down and i asked if i could join in and the guy wasn't really into it, but javier said please let terence blow your cock and i blew the stud muffin's cock

i remember emailing javier to never forget that my art will always have the the power to give him more passion for life than sex and coke and he immediately replied back NEVER WILL!

i remember shopping for poppers in berlin with javier ass i was too shy to get them myself and when we finally found this sex store in schoenberg we went crazy cause it had 1000s of dvd porn and javier and i dropped about 3000 euro in ten minutes buying the greatest porn ever and i still jerk off to them whenever i think i am running out of art ideas

i rememeber always being really jealous when javier would find a new boyfriend because i knew that meant that for a few weeks he wouldn't pay attention to me as much and i also remember feeling completely evil and selfish when he would break up with a boyfriend and i would feel extremely subconsiously happy cause he would pay all his attention to me again

i remember almost all the countless times i told javier i was going to be the artist that would make the next evolutionary jump in not just art history but history for our millenium and then feeling about half an hour later that i really should work on my modesty skills

i remember the time in leon, spain when we were having our usual late all night discussions and we were talking about what would go on my epitaph on my tombstone and then going to take a piss and it suddenly came to me when the yellow stream was coming out of my dick what it was going to be, and running to javier and telling him it would say LOVE FOR ETERNITY

i will forever and forever and forever remember the magic javier and me created for our first show in that tiny mighty gallery on chung king road in chinatown, los angeles almost five years ago

hugs love hugsterence koh

new york city, march 13, 2008 sometime after midnight

Javier Peres is pleased to announce Terence KOH's third solo exhibition in Los Angeles, "The Whole Family." Terence Koh (b. 1980, China. Lives in NY, Beijing and Berlin) will be present for the opening.

"The Whole Family" will be on view at Peres Projects (969 Chung King Road, Los Angeles) through June 21, 2008. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, from 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M and by appointment.

EXHIBITIONS, PROJECTS AND TEXTS BY PLB

ABOUT ME

"At the end of the fifteenth of his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind' Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that ‘Man is only completely human when he plays’, and assures us that this paradox is capable ‘of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. We could reformulate this thought as follows: there exists a specific sensory experience—the aesthetic—that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach..." from
Jacques Rancier, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', New Left Review 14, April-March 2002

SHORT BIO

Pablo León de la Barra is an exhibition maker, independent curator and researcher. He was born in Mexico City in 1972. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London. He has curated among other exhibitions ‘To Be Political it Has to Look Nice’ (2003) at apexart and Art in General in New York; ‘PR04 Biennale’ (2004, co-curator) in Puerto Rico; ‘George and Dragon at ICA’ (2005) at the ICA-London; ‘Glory Hole’ (2006) at the Architecture Foundation-London; ‘Sueño de Casa Propia’(2007-2008, in collaboration with Maria Ines Rodriguez) at Centre de Art Contemporaine-Geneve, Casa Encendida-Madrid, Casa del Lago-Mexico City, and Cordoba, Spain; ‘This Is Not America’ at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); ‘Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at the CCE in Guatemala (2010); ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, Cerith Wyn Evans at Casa Barragan, Mexico City (2010); ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); 'Bananas is my Business: the Southamerican Way' at Museu Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janeiro (co-curated with Julieta Gonzalez, 2011); 'MicroclimaS' at Kunsthalle Zurich (2012); 'Esquemas para una Oda Tropical', Rio de Janeiro, 2012; 'Marta 'Che' Traba' at Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires (2012); Novo Museo Tropical at Teoretica, San Jose, Costa Rica (2012); Museu Labirinto / Museum of Unlimited Growth, ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (2012); The Camino Real Arcades, Lima, Peru (2012). PLB has acted as advisor and/or art curator for the following art fairs: Pinta/London (2010-12), Maco/Mexico (2009-1012), Circa/Puerto Rico (2010), La Otra/Bogota (2009), ArteBA/ Buenos Aires (2012), ArtRio/Rio de Janeiro (2011-2013). León de la Barra has written amongst other publications for: Frog/Paris, PinUp/New York, Purple/Paris, Spike/Austria, Tar/Italy, Wallpaper/London, Celeste/Mexico, Tomo/Mexico, Rufino/Mexico, Ramona/Buenos Aires, Metropolis M/Amsterdam, Numero Cero/Puerto Rico. PLB has also written texts for many artists and exhibition catalogues, lectured internationally and participated in many international symposiums where relevant topics to arts, culture and society have been discussed. PLB was co-director of ‘24-7’ an artists-curatorial collective in London from 2002-2005 and artistic director of ‘Blow de la Barra’ in London from 2005-2008. From 2005 to 2012 he was curator of the White Cubicle Gallery in London, a community art space which he also founded. He is also founder of the Novo Museo Tropical, a museum yet to physically exist somewhere in the tropics and curated the First Bienal Tropical in San Juan Puerto Rico (2011). He is also the publisher of Pablo Internacional Editions and editor of his own blog the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. He lives and works between London, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, San Juan, Bogota, Lima, Athens, Beirut...